Helping the Rich Be Happy, Too

Adviser shuns mechanics of giving and helps wealthy people explore the feelings behind philanthropy

Peter White helps rich people find happiness.

“My joy in life is in helping people blossom,” he says.

Mr. White gave up a successful law practice to start a consulting business, called International Skye. His clients are from some of this country’s richest families. Their net worth totals billions of dollars and their donations to charity are worth hundreds of millions. The Rockefeller family numbers among Mr. White’s regulars, who pay $10,000 for a year of his counseling.

Mr. White is part of the growing legion of advisers to the wealthy — most of whom help their clients reduce their taxes, start foundations, or make donations. But he’s different.

“There are many advisers who are much more mechanical in terms of assets, legal issues, and all that stuff,” says H. Peter Karoff, president of the Philanthropic Initiative in Boston, a non-profit group that helps rich people create foundations and manage donations. “But Peter’s really created an unusual network.”

Mr. White, a devout Christian, uses no textbooks or pat solutions in his work. Instead, he applies a blend of self-help tips, psychotherapy, spirituality, and pointed questions to guide his clients to their own answers. He says he gets clients to talk about their problems and figure out solutions, rather than suggesting any himself.

Topics in his private and group counseling sessions include overcoming family communication problems, guilt about wealth, and finding a deeper meaning in life.

He never tells clients how to spend their money — or even to spend it at all. But their work with International Skye ultimately has a profound effect on their charitable giving. In Mr. White’s view, people who “find themselves” are people who find philanthropy.

“Those who are most interested in philanthropy are the people who have, in effect, come to grips with what’s important to them in life,” he says. They are better able, he adds, to “extend out of their own immediate needs” to think about the larger needs of the world.

His clients’ testimony bears that out.

“International Skye gives you a place to define what community is, what having enough is, and what being happy is really all about — where enough is enough,” says Starling Winston Childs, great-grandson of the first president of the General Electric Company. “There is an awful lot you can give of yourself and your time. You can find ways of being actively involved in the things that you really care about.”

He adds that while dealing with family business can be emotionally bloody, “the blood-less, happy area of the family — the feel-good place — tends to be around the family philanthropic table.”

Says William Kornreich, who brought in Mr. White to ease tensions over succession in the family insurance business, “In the process of becoming more responsible for our own lives, we discover how to use our social capital.”

Susan White, Mr. White’s wife and a part-time organizer of International Skye activities, says there is a real sense of purpose at her husband’s company. “Working with the wealthy on their family and personal issues is an opportunity to make a difference,” says the onetime fund raiser for the Houston Ballet. “They hold a tremendous amount of power in our society. They can do massive things with just their names.”

Some of International Skye’s clients have discovered the power of just volunteering their time. Last summer a group of clients traveled to Florida to replant grass on a storm-ravished island. Another group spent their vacation time building a house under the auspices of Habitat for Humanity.

International Skye — the name comes from a Scottish island where Mr. White vacations — is based here, in the upscale neighborhood of Georgetown. Its small suite of offices is decorated with high-backed chairs, floral drapes, and Oriental rugs — all of which look like they could have been bought at a Rockefeller yard sale.

Mr. White says he normally doesn’t meet with clients at his office but makes trips to theirs. He and his associate Jody McCain — who, unlike Mr. White, has formal training in counseling — help 25 families a year.

Most of the clients are third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation descendants of their family’s original entrepreneur. Mr. White notes that those who inherit riches, rather than earn them, are most in need of “blossoming.”

“These younger people are in tremendous need of being what I call disenthralled from wealth,” he says. “The problem is, when the wealth is part of who you are, you’re marching not to your own drummer but usually to someone else’s. You’ll be less yourself than your father or whoever controls the purse strings.”

In addition to private sessions, International Skye has several other programs for wealthy people, including:

• The Skye Summer Institute, a four-day program for up to 35 people who have inherited wealth. Held on a dude ranch in Saddlestring, Wyo., it mixes morning meditation, sunset horseback rides, and bedtime stories with workshops on how to start a family foundation and plan an estate, as well as discussions on community activism and social change.
• Annual meetings of Skye clients and program participants. Topics have ranged from “commitment” to “beauty,” and guest speakers have included the AIDS activist Mary Fisher and the poets Maya Angelou and Rita Dove.
• The Financial Network, which includes lectures, meetings, and a clearinghouse of information on money management for International Skye clients.
• Periodic volunteer projects, which give participants an opportunity to donate time rather than big checks to charity. Last summer, 45 people gathered in Portland, Me., to hammer together a Habitat for Humanity house. The group slept in summer-camp-like cabins and shopped for and prepared their own meals_on a strict financial budget.

Mrs. White, who organized the trip, says: “They all want to do it again. It allowed them to do things other than just give money. It inspired them to branch out.”

Wolcott Henry, president of two family foundations that just moved here — the Henry Foundation and the Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation — says Skye’s Summer Institute is developing a new generation of family-foundation leaders.

Says Mr. Henry, who leads the institute’s workshop on family foundations: “Hopefully, I can give them something to take back to their foundations — management skills and a little excitement.” He adds: “I want to let them know it’s not dull — and it’s not easy — running a foundation. And I want to give them the confidence that you can make a difference no matter how small the foundation is.”

International Skye participants say the company’s straight talk and tough questions about responsibility and commitment are the catalysts that help them solve their family problems. They add that Peter White’s emphasis on finding meaning in their lives — and not focusing on their money — helps them evolve from being merely wealthy people to being wealthy with a cause to spend their money on.

Says Mr. Childs, the heir to the General Electric fortune: “I see Peter as one of the great influences in my life.”

When Mr. Childs first attended Skye’s Summer Institute in 1993, at age 38, his family office, S.W. Childs Management in New York, was “bleeding and hemorrhaging in red ink,” he says. (Family offices are businesses created by families to keep assets in one place, under the charge of personal accountants and lawyers.)

As the eldest son in the Childs family, Starling was under pressure from his ailing father to assume the mantle of leading the family office. At the same time, an uncle and several cousins were mounting a campaign to shut down the office and pass out the money. While dealing with the feuding factions, Mr. Childs watched enviously as his three siblings trotted off to California and pursued their artistic aspirations.

But Mr. Childs, who runs EECOS, a Norfolk, Conn.–based firm that helps landowners preserve woodland and farmland, says the Summer Institute allowed him to complain out loud about his predicament — and then come to terms with it.

Ultimately, he accepted his family responsibility — and saved the family office from dissolution. He also managed to improve relationships with his siblings and other relatives who must work together on the boards of the family’s philanthropies. Among other things, his family oversees one of the nation’s oldest cancer-research funds, the Jane Coffin Childs Fund for Medical Research, named for his grandmother, who died of the disease.

International Skye has not always focused on feelings over finance. When it began in 1986, Mr. White’s intention was to join the scores of advisers who work with money and legal matters.

But in his business’s first year, the Rockefeller Family Office commissioned him to study the offices of eight other families because it wanted to get new management ideas.

Mr. White repeatedly stumbled across family squabbles and tensions during the study. “The issues sort of seemed like they were around money,” he says. “But you could tell that they were really around the human issues that I’m dealing with much more intensively now.”

He began tailoring his business more and more to those issues. Now, he says, “money is just contrary to the work we do.” In fact, it is so far afield that he is seeking non-profit status for International Skye from the Internal Revenue Service. “It’s really educational, almost religious, what we’re doing,” he says, adding it makes sense for clients to make donations rather than pay fees.

Mr. Karoff of the Philanthropic Initiative, who is on International Skye’s board of advisers, says he agrees: “Much of what he does would easily qualify as not-for-profit.”

Like his business, Mr. White has evolved. In fact, people who knew him during his early days as a hotshot Washington lawyer might not recognize him today.

Mr. White says he came racing out of his bar exam in 1969 with no doubt that big salaries and widespread name recognition were the tickets to happiness.

At age 30, he thought he had arrived. He helped defend E. Howard Hunt, the mastermind behind the Watergate break-in, and worked on the Congressional investigation of Koreagate — a scandal that arose after Congressmen were accused of taking bribes from a South Korean businessman.

“I just thought I had it made,” he says. “I was doing everything I wanted and making a lot of money doing it.

“Except,” he pauses, “I wasn’t happy. And I was more anxious, more depressed every day.”

By 1981, a double-Scotch habit had become a double-that-double-Scotch habit, and his wife at the time — from whom he is now divorced — threatened to leave him. Reluctantly, he told her he would go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Mr. White credits that moment with changing his life: It is the milestone that marks the end of the hard-charging litigator and the beginning of the sensitive adviser.

“The path I began to walk down with A.A. was such a compelling path that it ruined my ambition to work with law,” he says. “It sent me on a course of learning and of the spirit.”

And he continues to seek new avenues for his ideas.

He has a vision of creating a non-profit center to study beauty and is looking for partners to bankroll the project. “It would be some sort of organization that formally looks at the role of beauty in modern life,” he says. “What does it say about us that we have graffiti all over the place? And we build ugly buildings. We tear down beautiful areas. What can we learn about ourselves from that?”

He notes that philanthropy often zeroes in on the sadness in the world rather than exalting its finest accomplishments, such as artists’ masterpieces. “Too many of us are inclined to say, Well, that’s not important now,” he says.

Ideally, he would like to create a graduate program in the study of beauty, but at this point he wants a few financial backers to start a small non-profit center, maybe an adjunct program at a college.

In addition to pondering beauty, he is tapping out his first book, tentatively titled Love and Money, about lessons drawn from his work on finding meaning amid materialism.

And what else? Almost anything is possible. Mr. White’s mission is broad: “I love helping people grow and find out who they are.

“Maybe one of these days I’ll find out who I am.”